Jeff Koons: One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank
Introduction
I first saw Jeff Koons’s work in the original Saatchi Gallery in Boundary Road,
North London, in 1987 as part of the two-part ‘NY Art Now’ exhibition.1 Upon
entering the building you walked past the reception desk before turning to the
right and descending a few steps into the main gallery. From there, there were
further galleries up to your left, but Koons’s work was in that first main space.
There was Rabbit (1986) from the Statuary series, the Jim Beam decanter train
from the Luxury and Degradation series (1986), and there were some Plexiglasencased vacuum cleaners from The New series (1980-86). All of this work was
arresting in various ways; there was a functionality denied to the vacuum
cleaners by their pristine, dust-free casing, and to the decanters of Jim Beam –
J.B. Turner Train by the need to keep their contents undrunk behind intact
factory seals. There was the implicit eroticism of the cleaners with their hoses,
drums, rigid and flexible tubes, their suction and their inflatable bags. In this
demonstration of polymorphous sexuality rather than in the fact of their
unaltered, shop-bought state, they paid elaborate homage to Marcel Duchamp.
And there was another kind of rigidity in Rabbit that contrasted with the blow-up
plastic toy from which it was cast, a contrast that drew Andy Warhol’s Silver
Clouds (1966) and Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures into contact with the onceinflated balloon of Piero Manzoni’s Fiato d’artista (Artist’s Breath, 1960). All of
this was absorbing, but none of it was what ultimately held the eye. Over
towards the far wall, resting on a simple black metal stand, was what looked like
a fish tank full of water. Suspended, it seemed, in the precise centre of this tank
was a Spalding Dr J Silver Series basketball. My first thought on approaching
was that it was a set-up, and that the ball had been cast in a block of some kind
of ultra-clear plastic. But even though the ball did not move, there were clues
‘NY Art Now’, running from September 1987 to January 1988, included work by
Ashley Bickerton, Ross Bleckner, Carroll Dunham, Robert Gober, Peter Halley, TiShan Hsu, Jonathan Kessler, Jeff Koons, Jonathan Lasker, Allan McCollum, Tim
Rollins and K.O.S., Peter Schuyff, Starn Twins, Haim Steinbach, Philip Taaffe, and
Meyer Vaisman.
.
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that gave the lie to that initial suspicion. Several small air bubbles on the ball’s
surface soon told me that it must be physics rather than subterfuge that lay
behind the apparent defiance of gravity. The ball had to contain some liquid
rather than just air, and the weight of the ball combined with the specific gravity
of this liquid must exactly match the specific gravity of the surrounding fluid. As
the work’s title, One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985), indicated, the system
must be in equilibrium, albeit a dynamic one that was unlikely to last for very
long. If the two fluids inside and surrounding the ball were different
concentrations of some salt solution or other, there would be exchange between
them. The gradient between the solutions would gradually even out, causing the
ball to sink slowly over a period of time. But that was something that would
happen at an unspecified point in the future. For the moment, the ball hung
there, equidistant from top and bottom of the tank, from its front and back, and
from each of its sides. It was unsullied and mute. It offered itself absolutely. It
was perfect.
Only three years before this, Charles Saatchi had published a lavish, four-volume
catalogue of his collection.2 It featured some of the major figures associated
with Pop and Minimalism, together with much work marking the more recent
resurgence of interest in gestural painting, and which was loosely branded under
the heading Neo-Expressionism. The catalogue had been given the title Art of
Our Time, as if to say, ‘Look no further, young man. This is it. This is what there
is.’ But things move and change quickly: none of the artists whose work was in
‘NY Art Now’ appeared in that catalogue. They were, on the whole, a little
younger, and while there were links and references, both positive and critical, to
much art that had preceded them, their work was already elsewhere. The
catalogue text for ‘NY Art Now’ took the form of an extended round-table
discussion between several contributors to the exhibition, including Koons,
Art of Our Time: The Saatchi Collection, 4 vols, Lund Humphries, London, 1984, and
Rizzoli International, New York, 1985.
(Vol 1: Andre, Baer, Bell, Flavin, Hesse, Judd, LeWitt, Mangold, Marden, Martin,
McCracken, Morris, Nauman, Ryman, Sandback, Serra, Tuttle; Vol 2: Artschwager,
Chamberlain, Samaras, Stella, Twombly, Warhol; Vol 3: Baselitz, Guston, Kiefer,
Morley, Polke, Schnabel; Vol 4: Bartlett, Borofsky, Burton, Close, Fischl, Golub,
Jenney, Jensen, Longo, Murray, Nutt, Rothenberg, Salle, Shapiro, Sherman,
Winters, Clemente, Deacon, Hodgkin, Kossoff, Scully, Willing.)
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Ashley Bickerton, Phillip Taaffe, Ross Bleckner, Tim Rollins and KOS, Meyer
Vaisman, Peter Halley and Haim Steinbach, although it was, as compiler Dan
Cameron made clear, a cut and paste job collaged together from a number of
individual interviews. The endgame tone to the lines of enquiry pursued in the
discussion bore in particular upon two pressing aspects of then-current cultural
and political reality. The first of these was the commodity form of the work of
art. If Neo-Expressionism was a return to painting following a decade in which
conceptualist practices had enquired into the nature and status of the art object,
the phenomenon could well be viewed negatively as a simple capitulation to
market forces. How – this new work by Koons, Bickerton, Vaisman, Halley and
others asked – might the realities of that market be acknowledged without the
art that fed it being reduced to a token whose value is determined wholly by its
place in the system of exchange? In similar vein, an exhibition at the Institute of
Contemporary Art in Boston the previous year, in 1986, had borrowed the name
of Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame (1957) for its own title.3 There, too, the show
focused critical attention on the question as to whether art might successfully
resist the pervasive reach of market economics. ‘Endgame’ included several
artists whose work was also included in ‘NY Art Now’ – Peter Halley, Ross
Bleckner, Philip Taaffe, Haim Steinbach and Jeff Koons – and was a show in
which, as David Ross, ICA Director at the time, wrote in his catalogue preface,
we could see artists ‘respond to the bleak situation in which the art object
approaches commodity status’.4 The second pressing issue informing the ‘NY Art
Now’ catalogue discussion was the appearance and continued disturbing
presence of AIDS in society as a whole and in particular within the artistic
community. Paintings in the exhibition by Philip Taaffe, Peter Schuyff and Ross
Bleckner spoke vividly of a profound effort to assimilate and comprehend the
personal and social impact of this new condition. In their work, the imagery of
Op art was presented as the last modernist hurrah – it was the moment, they
‘Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture’, Institute
of Contemporary Art, Boston, September 25 – November 30, 1986. The catalogue,
edited by the exhibition’s curators David Joselit and Elizabeth Sussman, was
published by ICA Boston and MIT, Cambridge, Mass, 1986. ‘Endgame’ included
work by Ross Bleckner, Peter Halley, Sherrie Levine, Philip Taaffe, General Idea,
Jon Kessler, Jeff Koons, Joel Otterson, Haim Steinbach, Richard Baim, Gretchen
Bender and Perry Hoberman.
4
Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture, p 8
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seemed to be saying, at which modern art’s development ran out of steam.
What better than to take this point of exhaustion as subject matter and – in
another kind of endgame – to refigure it, to make it the focus of an intense,
productive engagement carried on in circumstances that made any activity
beyond what was necessary for the continuance of existence look futile and
irrelevant?
I looked at One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank for a long time, and I recall thinking
two things. Firstly, that this work was very definitely in the way. It sat slap bang
in the middle of whatever road you wanted to go down, and you couldn’t simply
pass it by. You couldn’t ignore it. It had to be reckoned with, negotiated.
Secondly, I thought that whatever I had been told about art up until that point
was not adequate to deal with it. My own poor review of ‘NY Art Now’ made that
inadequacy painfully clear, resorting as it did to the dismissive put-down rather
than to a proper addressing of the works in the exhibition and of the issues
which animated them. What stood out even then, however, was what I referred
to as the ‘exquisite stillness’ of One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank.5 One Ball Total
knew all that stuff I knew, all the history, especially the bits about Duchamp and
Dada and Surrealism and Expressionism and Pop and Minimalism and
Conceptualism; it was well-versed in all the theory, all the stuff about value and
the commodity status of the art work – aesthetic value, exchange value, use
value; it had read all the stuff about Donald Judd’s ‘specific objects’ and Michael
Fried’s theatricality and Rosalind Krauss’s articulation of Robert Morris’s
‘complex and expanded field’;6 it was familiar with the intensity of the current
debates about postmodernity, and about the ways in which we were now
suffering an experience that people were excited to call, after Fredric Jameson,
5
Michael Archer, ‘NY Art Now’, Art Monthly, November 1987, p 23
See Donald Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, Arts Review Yearbook 8, 1965, reprinted in
Donald Judd, Complete Writings 1959 – 1975, The Press of the Nova Scotia College of
Art and Design, Halifax, and New York University Press, New York, 1975, pp 181-9;
Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, Artforum, June 1967, reprinted in Gregory
Battcock (ed), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, E.P. Dutton & Co, New York, 1968,
pp 116-47; and Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October, no 8,
Spring 1979, reprinted in Hal Foster (ed), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern
Culture, Bay Press, Port Townsend, Washington, 1983, pp .
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‘the abolition of critical distance’.7 It was aware, because we had been to the
moon and had seen with our own eyes, that the world was a fragile place, an
ecosystem whose delicate balance could be disturbed by the slightest
occurrence. It knew all of that stuff, and it passed judgement on none of it. It
wasn’t that it dismissed any of it either. To do that would have required it to
signal the taking of a position just as much as aligning with, or opposing any
part of it would. If anything, what was so striking was that it was politely
accepting of the world in which such things, with their attendant histories and
theories, existed. It could do that because the world was, after all, the same
world in which it, too, existed as a basketball floating in a tank of water. It was
what it was. And it knew, too, that Frank Stella had once said something like
that: ‘What you see is what you see.’8 It might have been happy for you if you
knew that as well, but it wasn’t relying on Stella in any way. It didn’t need Stella
to have said that in order to be what it was. It was a basketball floating in a tank
of water. It was what it was, and it was perfect.
+++++++++++++++
See Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’,
New Left Review, no 146, July/August 1984, pp 53-92, especially Section VI: ‘The
Abolition of Critical Distance’.
8 See Bruce Glaser, ‘Questions to Stella and Judd: An Interview edited by Lucy
Lippard’, Art News, September 1966, reprinted in Battcock (ed), Minimal Art: A
Critical Anthology, p 158.
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